procrastination diagram - June 2005

I have a room (and have had all weekend), and I'm in the process of moving stuff into it so we can decompress the living room. More on other stuff later.

How a brief flash of optimism can be almost entirely crushed by a little bit of pessimism and and too much reality.

... but I should be able to move into my room this weekend, finally. So life goes on.

I (mostly, see below) moved on Memorial Day weekend, back to Grey 17, which is in much better shape than when I moved out in 2000.

As is predictable in such things, much went wrong:

• My car developed a flat tire the week before, and I had to get it replaced that Saturday (sidewall leak, unpatchable).
• Exhausted from packing and moving, after things were mostly done on Monday, I slipped and fell down the front steps at Grey when I zoned out. I landed on my rear end, which mostly doesn't hurt anymore.
• I discovered about half an hour before my stuff was supposed to start leaving my previous residence that the room I was moving into was not actually yet available, due to a variety of scheduling snafus involving contractors with unexpectedly expired insurance who therefore couldn't schedule electrical inspections, thus delaying the installation of walls in the room that the people in the room I was moving into were planning to move into.

This obviously has its drawbacks; the couch I've ended up sleeping on isn't that comfortable, and is about an inch too short, and the only place I get reliable privacy is the bathroom, which grates occasionally. You can't really make phone calls from there without annoying people.

On the other hand, Grey now comes with a variety of luxuries that I had either forgotten the pleasantness of or plain hadn't experienced before:

• Water pressure. Water pressure? WATER PRESSURE! (Malkovich) My previous residence had what was, in retrospect, really low water pressure. Decent water pressure is nice, especially in conjunction with
• a constant-temperature shower valve. It mixes the hot and cold water so as to (theoretically) vary the flow, but not the temperature. This probably needs to be experienced for one to realize how nice it is.
• While I'm in the area, a bathroom that I can swing my arms in and get into without squeezing past something.
• Floors made out of actual semi-contiguous hardwood, as opposed to white pine with occasional half-inch wide gaps.
• A clothes dryer that, well, dries, and vents to the outside.
• And what is nearly my favorite thing ever... central air conditioning. At least after I cleaned the filter.

I realize that I will be the last person to point this out, but on Monday, Apple announced that they will be switching to Intel processors, and Debian produced a new stable release after three years.

Have you ever noticed that seemingly unlikely events that people joke about being signs of the coming apocalypse tend to happen in groups?

Meanwhile, something that I've been predicting for a while is starting to happen, which AFAIK is not a sign of the apocalypse: Laptop computers outsold desktops for the first time last month.

I read about cars once (thirty seconds of web surfing failed to find a cite) that convertibles (which used less material) were once cheaper than fixed-roof models (which were considered more luxurious). I think something similar is happening to computers; laptops are arguably of more utility to the consumer. My question is whether this will eventually push the parts to build your own desktop PC back up out of the commodity range.